Hello all!
This week, in addition to all my other activities, I spoke to my “uncle” Dave. He’s more like family than a friend. But, Dave is a very active member of social media and he shares articles that interest him. Typically, I do not have too many issues as they are Buzzfeed or games. However, sometimes he does get a little political. We have talked about this in the past as sometimes they interest me; during the political race last term.
Dave has told me that if he reads the article, he shares it. This is good because he actually reads them, however, I have seen some sites that are less than suitable: The Onion, for example. Here is a fun Onion article!
I spoke to him about knowing what credible sources that he could reblog from. I went in depth by saying that there are people who create amazing-looking articles that can be so far from the truth that it often slanders other parties.
After our talk, he seemed more surprised there are articles which look like news and are still allowed to remain in publication. We went over a few stories he had on his wall; which he politely asked to keep at least one or two.
Overall, I would say that this went over pretty successfully because Dave knew that some things people share are nonsense, but didn’t know he was also a part of the problem. Following our talk, he recently shared one of his articles that were not deleted and even urged some of his friends to do the same and spread awareness of how harmful these fake news articles were.